{"id":245,"date":"2026-10-28T14:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-10-28T14:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sripuwath.com\/index.php\/2026\/10\/28\/239-remkus-de-vries-on-how-scanfully-2-0-is-making-wordpress-security-and-performance-monitoring-simpler\/"},"modified":"2026-10-28T14:00:00","modified_gmt":"2026-10-28T14:00:00","slug":"239-remkus-de-vries-on-how-scanfully-2-0-is-making-wordpress-security-and-performance-monitoring-simpler","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sripuwath.com\/index.php\/2026\/10\/28\/239-remkus-de-vries-on-how-scanfully-2-0-is-making-wordpress-security-and-performance-monitoring-simpler\/","title":{"rendered":"#239 \u2013 Remkus De Vries on How Scanfully 2.0 Is Making WordPress Security and Performance Monitoring Simpler"},"content":{"rendered":"
\nTranscript<\/summary>\n
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[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley:<\/strong> Welcome to the Jukebox podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.<\/p>\n

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case how Scanfully 2.0 is making WordPress security and performance monitoring simpler.<\/p>\n

If you\u2019d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com\/feed\/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.<\/p>\n

If you have a topic that you\u2019d like us to feature on the podcast, I\u2019m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea, featured on the show. Head to wptavern.com\/contact\/jukebox, and use the form there.<\/p>\n

So on the podcast today we have Remkus de Vries. Remkus has been active in the WordPress space for over 20 years, starting out with his own agency focused on high performance, scalable WordPress websites. Over time he has diversified into education and community building with projects like WithinWP, and a new initiative, The Guild, which is a paid community aimed at helping people build smarter, more performance, sites through a first principles approach.<\/p>\n

Our conversation centres on Scanfully, a site health and monitoring SaaS Remkus co-founded, which recently hit version 2.0. Scanfully\u2019s focus is giving users meaningful, actionable, insights into WordPress site, health, security performance, email, deliverability, DNS, and more. Packing all this data into an easy to understand dashboard.<\/p>\n

We talk about Remkus\u2019 motivation for diving deep into the complexities of WordPress monitoring, and why many users struggle to keep on top of the technical side of their websites. Remkus argues that too many site owners are stuck in a reactive mode, only investigating issues once something breaks. And Scanfully aims to change that mindset by making ongoing health checks accessible and easy to parse, even for the spreadsheet averse.<\/p>\n

Remkus walks us through the products evolution, including the 2.0 update that aimed to reimagine their dashboard experience, added public APIs, and introduced tools like MCP AI integration, empowering users to query their sites health conversationally.<\/p>\n

We also get into recent and upcoming features such as WooCommerce checkout monitoring, activity logs, and future add-ons designed to cover forms and other business critical flows.<\/p>\n

If you manage multiple WordPress sites, run an agency or are simply interested in building more robust futureproof WordPress projects, this episode is for you.<\/p>\n

If you\u2019re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com\/podcast, where you can find all the other episodes as well.<\/p>\n

And so without further delay, I bring you Remkus de Vries.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m joined on the podcast by Remkus de Vries. Hello, Remkus.<\/p>\n

[00:03:29] Remkus:<\/strong> Hello, Nathan.<\/p>\n

[00:03:30] Nathan Wrigley:<\/strong> It\u2019s been a while. Remkus and I have been on many calls in the last few days and weeks. We\u2019re going to have today about a project that Remkus has been actively involved in for a number of years. It\u2019s called Scanfully. We\u2019ve reached version, I\u2019m going to say 2.0, let\u2019s go with that.<\/p>\n

[00:03:46] Remkus:<\/strong> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.<\/p>\n

[00:03:47] Nathan Wrigley:<\/strong> But over the last few days it\u2019s actually advanced a little beyond that. So that\u2019s going to be the main focus.<\/p>\n

I would probably urge listeners to this podcast. If you want to understand what the product is and how it works, maybe press pause. Go to Scanfully.com, so scanfully.com, and then come back and you\u2019ll understand fully what the product is.<\/p>\n

Before we get stuck into updates and product and what it all does. Very briefly, Remkus, do you want to just tell us a little bit about you, your backstory, WordPress space, that kind of thing?<\/p>\n

[00:04:17] Remkus:<\/strong> Yeah, sure. Been in the WordPress space, active, 20 plus years now. Started with an agency, very quickly moved into complex performance scaling, more complicated type of sites.<\/p>\n

Ran a niche agency like that for a very long time. In the last couple of years I\u2019ve been doing some diversification. I have withinwp, which is a WordPress, how do I explain this? Because this is also in transit, but it\u2019s a podcast, it\u2019s a newsletter. One that\u2019s being cited by This Week in WordPress a lot, I should say.<\/p>\n

And part of it is the educational side, which is the part that I\u2019m building out currently. And what I mean with educational side, that I\u2019m preparing a community, a paid community, that has the sole goal to help you better understand WordPress and build better sites, smarter sites, more performance sites, that sort of stuff. Basic first principles type approach.<\/p>\n

And that is roughly how I look at WordPress. And Scanfully is something I started with my co-founder Barry, let\u2019s call it three years ago. And from a similar angle, we want to solve, essentially site health and performance monitoring tool of your WordPress site in the broadest sense of the word. Meaning the word Scanfully is literal. We scan fully and what we\u2019re not scanning fully currently, we will be.<\/p>\n

[00:05:32] Nathan Wrigley:<\/strong> Okay. Thank you. Can I ask a question? May touch on your personality, I guess. All those years ago, 20 plus years when you came into WordPress. How can you explain why you delved into this bit? Because there were so many ways that you could have gone, but you\u2019ve really made scanning, and site health, and monitoring and performance, that is your thing. Is there a bit of that which, speaks to you on some level? Do you find yourself drawn in that direction, no matter where you look on the internet?<\/p>\n

[00:05:58] Remkus:<\/strong> Yeah.<\/p>\n

[00:05:59] Nathan Wrigley:<\/strong> Do you enjoy data analytics, spreadsheets, numbers, all of that?<\/p>\n

[00:06:03] Remkus:<\/strong> I wouldn\u2019t call it enjoy, but, I\u2019ve always been good at it. I always found it fun to some degree. But in general, I get bored quite easily. If I\u2019m to stick with a topic, it needs to be the complicated version of a topic. To me, in web development, that quickly revolves around all the things that make a WordPress site more tricky to scale, or more tricky to make fast, or more tricky to fill in the blank. There\u2019s tonnes of different subtopics to that.<\/p>\n

[00:06:25] Nathan Wrigley:<\/strong> Yeah.<\/p>\n

[00:06:26] Remkus:<\/strong> And that then gives you a different view of what is important. And Scanfully is one of the answers to that. we. See that there\u2019s, I think the whole industry is levelling up in a way. I don\u2019t think it\u2019s happening fast enough, but part of it forces you to start thinking about things in a more professional way, like more preemptively understanding what is something that\u2019s going on. What is a trend on your site? What do you see happening? And I think we\u2019re still too much on the reactive side of things. So if my side is down, or if somebody complains it\u2019s slow, then I\u2019ll have a look. And we want to change that awareness and make it one of your first thoughts instead of an afterthought.<\/p>\n

[00:07:02] Nathan Wrigley:<\/strong> It\u2019s a curious thing then that the complexity which you enjoy, in a sense, you require other people to not enjoy it as much as you, in order for you to have a product. And I am one of those people. If you present me with a, I don\u2019t know, a Google Analytics dashboard, or a spreadsheet which goes beyond about four rows, then I quickly lose interest. I genuinely can\u2019t maintain my effort over there. I glaze over and don\u2019t enjoy it.<\/p>\n

And so part of the problem with dealing with WordPress is getting over that hump. Maintaining the interest in an area that I feel ill-equipped, not just ill-equipped, completely out of my depth.<\/p>\n

And so having tooling, the likes of which you\u2019ve built with Scanfully enables people like me to actually stand back and go, okay, that complicated thing is made more easy. I can actually start to understand it in real terms, with data and charts that are less overwhelming. And I guess that\u2019s the point.<\/p>\n

[00:07:53] Remkus:<\/strong> That is the point, and that is essentially also the driver, why we went from dashboard version 1.x to now, 2.x. Because it\u2019s very easy when you\u2019re on the more technical side of things and you kind of understand what the signal is and what it\u2019s implying to forget what the person who doesn\u2019t understand the extra layers and the assumptions that go underneath. Like what does that actually mean?<\/p>\n

The 2.0 rebrand. Because it\u2019s not a rebrand in terms of what we do, but it\u2019s a rebrand and how we interpret every single version of the monitoring metrics that we collect, how we present it, and what we allow you to do with it. Everything has been rethought. It\u2019s been a, I think in total, we\u2019ve had about four or five months of just working with a redesign. And we call it a redesign because it is, because it visually looks different.<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve got all this feedback of how people are using it. And a common theme was, we\u2019re missing this, we\u2019re missing that. Could you make that easier? So we were like, okay, that\u2019s a lot of stuff pointing in the same direction. Why don\u2019t we start rethinking how we\u2019re going about helping you figure this out?<\/p>\n

And I\u2019ll give you a very concrete example. So if a site goes down, because we have an uptime monitoring, you get a notification. But if it\u2019s the server that goes down and you have 25 sites on that server, it doesn\u2019t make a lot of sense for you to receive 25 emails.<\/p>\n

[00:09:05] Nathan Wrigley:<\/strong> No.<\/p>\n

[00:09:06] Remkus:<\/strong> So gathering information per monitoring alert is something we\u2019re doing now. And, the same goes for if there\u2019s, I don\u2019t know, if the latest plugin you\u2019re using on all of your sites has something that needs to be fixed, or something that is already fixed. So let\u2019s assume there\u2019s a security release for it. You don\u2019t need to know that 25 emails. You need to know there\u2019s one email, and these are the sites that are affected. But you also want to know, is this a high risk? Is this a medium risk? Is this a low risk?<\/p>\n

Because there\u2019s plenty of security stuff that is so close to impossible to replicate that, do I need to act right now? Maybe, but we give you the insight that you can act upon it. Like it\u2019s not, we\u2019re not forcing you to pay all the attention all the time.<\/p>\n

And it\u2019s things like that. So we had the data already, but the question then becomes, how do we make this digestible? How does this become a signal, versus the noise that it\u2019s also is? So that\u2019s a lot of rethinking. That\u2019s a lot of rethinking in what is valuable to share, and how is it valuable to share and what are the things you would like to do with certain things?<\/p>\n

So, an example, related to that is what if there is an update available for a plugin that you\u2019re using in a few places? But there\u2019s no fix yet. Do we need to send you every single day that there is a security update? Or there\u2019s a security issue? Probably not. So why don\u2019t we allow you to snooze a particular alert? It\u2019s simple things like that. And I say simple. It\u2019s not simple to implement, but.<\/p>\n

[00:10:27] Nathan Wrigley:<\/strong> Simple on the front end.<\/p>\n

[00:10:28] Remkus:<\/strong> Yeah. Simple for you as an end user. So that was a lot of thinking and figuring out how do we make this more pleasurable, for as pleasurable as the topic itself is.<\/p>\n

[00:10:39] Nathan Wrigley:<\/strong> I\u2019m going to circle back to the product in a moment, but I\u2019m going to ask you a curious question.<\/p>\n

[00:10:43] Remkus:<\/strong> Yep.<\/p>\n

[00:10:43] Nathan Wrigley:<\/strong> You may balk at this question and think, okay, that\u2019s unusual and a bit weird. Is the WordPress space for you quite an exasperating thing. And what I mean by that is, you are obviously steeped in this knowledge, about how things can go wrong, and how a poor implementation of something over here can have catastrophic effects over there. Given enough time, and the stars aligning in a certain way.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know how to describe this. Does that mean that everywhere you look, you just see catastrophe and problems. And you open up a WordPress website, you\u2019ve got a new client or somebody\u2019s onboarded you with the plugin. You look inside and you sort of face plant, head slap. Okay. All the stuff that I know, which is second nature to me. Why don\u2019t they all know this? There\u2019s no question there, but can you see what I\u2019m trying to.<\/p>\n

[00:11:27] Remkus:<\/strong> Yeah. Yeah, I can. You\u2019re not recording the video. The people listening didn\u2019t see me nod along the way of what you were saying, but yes. If you understand things. So there\u2019s a principle called first principles. Which means everything we approach, we should approach from the first principles. Like what is the base layer of where to solve problems. And, this is not even just WordPress, this is life, I guess.<\/p>\n

But there\u2019s a big tendency for people to look at a problem and then have the idea of how they want to fix the problem, but they don\u2019t actually look at the layer, it should be fixed. They just want to fix the outing. That\u2019s not really a fix, right. You fix things at the bottom layer. You can identify where the problem lives.<\/p>\n

And when that is your view on life slash work. Yeah, there\u2019s moments where you go, how do you, not look into this? This is your work, this is your job, this is your, competency. Why do you not dive into this? But I also understand that\u2019s not for everybody to be in that layer of how I look at things. And it\u2019s not me wanting to force other people, my model of the world, but it is something where I go, you don\u2019t need to do my model of the world, but there\u2019s some stuff that you actually should be quite skilled on because it\u2019s part of your job. Because it touches your job. It touches the clients you serve and all of that sort of stuff. Long-winded answer, but yes, I have those moments.<\/p>\n

[00:12:39] Nathan Wrigley:<\/strong> Yeah, I guess it must be the same no matter which bit of WordPress you\u2019re in. So for example, I don\u2019t know if you\u2019re a front end designer and you see catastrophic use of fonts and spacing and typography, and it would make the head plant moment occur. But also accessibility. And there\u2019s these tendrils isn\u2019t there? And we can\u2019t become expert at all of them, but many of the things are inconveniences. Where if something goes wrong, it\u2019s annoying, but that\u2019s probably where it ends.<\/p>\n

Whereas the stuff that you are dealing with, there\u2019s a potential for catastrophe to occur. The website gets defaced or taken down, or the server gets compromised and is used in some crazy way that we can\u2019t imagine. That makes your part I suppose a little bit more essential. But then, as as you said, we can\u2019t all be experts, and relying on the expertise that you have and the tools that you\u2019ve built. I suppose that\u2019s why you occupy the space that you do.<\/p>\n

[00:13:33] Remkus:<\/strong> Yeah.<\/p>\n

[00:13:33] Nathan Wrigley:<\/strong> Because not everybody can spend the time becoming as knowledgeable as, as you have become.<\/p>\n

[00:13:37] Remkus:<\/strong> And I, for the record, I don\u2019t acclaim to have all the knowledge. I just happen to specialise on a few things I find highly interesting.<\/p>\n

[00:13:44] Nathan Wrigley:<\/strong> Yeah.<\/p>\n

[00:13:44] Remkus:<\/strong> My goal for the Within WordPress community that I want to build, which is called The Guild, is exactly to behave like a guild. We\u2019re all there to elevate each other up. That is what a guild is supposed to do. And, back in the day, you had guilds that were that you went there, you were part of it, and all that had as a goal was to help you elevate your craft.<\/p>\n

And we need to start thinking about what we do as a craft. And how do you do your craft? Well there\u2019s tonnes of different ways to do the craft that\u2019s putting bread on the table. But if you\u2019re not actively developing yourself to become better at your craft, then what are you doing? You\u2019re, essentially behind in the first week you start working. And you\u2019re only playing catch up. And most people have forgotten that they\u2019re just in the game of playing catch up. Which I think is a shame.<\/p>\n

[00:14:26] Nathan Wrigley:<\/strong> You\u2019ve alluded from various bits and pieces that you said. You\u2019ve suggested what Scanfully does. So we have an idea that there\u2019s charts, and graphs, and information about things that could be going wrong with your website in the background. But we haven\u2019t really explained what the tool does at its core.<\/p>\n

So putting the update to one side, if we just examine why you built the tool in the first place, what does it broadly do? And then we can get into what it most recently does and how it\u2019s been adapted for the 2.x version.<\/p>\n

[00:14:55] Remkus:<\/strong> So Scanfully is about giving you the information so you know what broke on your site, and what changed and what things you need to pay attention to. Anywhere from critical stuff. So vulnerabilities, downtime, to also adjacent critically, are my emails being sent from the site? Does that still work? So we do email monitoring. We do DNS checking.<\/p>\n

We do all kinds of site health, like actual site health menu inside of WordPress. We pull in that data so you can see and you can filter for which of my sites are in PHP seven point, whatever still? You can figure that out.<\/p>\n

If you need to do all kinds of filtering on data that is living in all of your WordPress sites. That\u2019s a pain in the ass to have to click through every single site to figure out what\u2019s what. And maybe your control panel on your server tells you something, but Scanfully will tell you everything.<\/p>\n

We will tell you how large the uploads folder is. We will tell you, is your certificate about to be renewed, yes or no? Did anything go wrong when that happened? Things like that.<\/p>\n

So anything and everything that goes into the bucket of what is site health, what is a healthy site mean? We are monitoring, or we will be monitoring. We still have a very long list of stuff we\u2019re going to add. But yeah, the goal for Scanfully is to have you be in control of what\u2019s going on with your site.<\/p>\n

[00:16:19] Nathan Wrigley:<\/strong> Ok thank you. I have some follow up questions just to that, so the first one is. Who has been, or who potentially is your ideal customer? So I\u2019m going to broadly bucket that as, I don\u2019t know the person who\u2019s got just one WordPress, or a handful of WordPress websites and they manage that themselves. Are they the kind of people that you are trying to get? And then I\u2019m going to go into different buckets of enterprise perhaps. Agency level customers. I\u2019m imagining there\u2019s some perfect fit there.<\/p>\n

[00:16:42] Remkus:<\/strong> Yep.<\/p>\n

[00:16:43] Nathan Wrigley:<\/strong> And then also I\u2019m wondering if hosting companies also might be a customer of yours in terms of adding this in, to a deployed website on their platform.<\/p>\n

[00:16:53] Remkus:<\/strong> They are now. One of the features we added, we kind of already had it, but we added publicly now, with Scanfully 2.0 is a public API. Which means if there\u2019s a public API, anybody can hook into whatever data we have, and display that in their dashboard or website, or wherever they would choose to do so.<\/p>\n

So yes, we cast a broad net, But the goal is for any client that needs to be in control of what\u2019s going on with their site. But the reality is this is from freelancers to agencies and indeed, hosting type of adjacent companies. Yeah.<\/p>\n

[00:17:25] Nathan Wrigley:<\/strong> Right. So there\u2019s a fit across all of those three things that I just mentioned?<\/p>\n

[00:17:29] Remkus:<\/strong> Yeah.<\/p>\n

[00:17:29] Nathan Wrigley:<\/strong> And do you have pricing that reflects that? So in other words, can you buy a single licence, and a multiple licence and a, I don\u2019t know, an unlimited licence?<\/p>\n

[00:17:37] Remkus:<\/strong> It\u2019s a flat structure. It\u2019s 299 a month per site. Simple.<\/p>\n

[00:17:41] Nathan Wrigley:<\/strong> And, in terms of the level of depth of technical understanding that you have to have in order to get the tool working, is this more a case of upload the plugin, activate the plugin, and then there are some sensible defaults? Or do we have to do a tonne of background research to understand what\u2019s going on? And maybe that\u2019ll lead us into the 2.0 stuff in a minute.<\/p>\n

[00:17:59] Remkus:<\/strong> There\u2019s nothing more than installing and activating.<\/p>\n

[00:18:03] Nathan Wrigley:<\/strong> Okay.<\/p>\n

[00:18:03] Remkus:<\/strong> And even the activating we have made as frictionless as possible. The only thing you need to do is once the plugin is activated, you click that button that says connect to your Scanfully dashboard, and assuming you\u2019re already logged in there, clicking that button is all you need to do. There\u2019s no copying pasting of keys and other weird stuff.<\/p>\n

[00:18:18] Nathan Wrigley:<\/strong> So I presume from what you said earlier, the 2.x, the article that I\u2019m going to link to in the show notes on the WP Tavern website is about 2.0, but I understand time has passed and probably by the time this episode will be on two point something.<\/p>\n

[00:18:32] Remkus:<\/strong> 2.3.<\/p>\n

[00:18:33] Nathan Wrigley:<\/strong> It would appear that you obviously took a stab at what you thought people would like to see in their dashboards. That\u2019s one of the things that\u2019s been updated. How did you adapt that over time then? Because, like we said earlier, getting complicated data to be easy to understand, that is a proper art form. I don\u2019t think you\u2019ll probably ever end this journey.<\/p>\n

[00:18:52] Remkus:<\/strong> No. No.<\/p>\n

[00:18:54] Nathan Wrigley:<\/strong> You\u2019ll just be iterating forever.<\/p>\n

[00:18:54] Remkus:<\/strong> Yeah.<\/p>\n

[00:18:54] Nathan Wrigley:<\/strong> But is that one of the things that you got feedback on? Okay, it\u2019s good, but we\u2019re still confused. Make it simpler to understand. Just describe that side of things.<\/p>\n

[00:19:02] Remkus:<\/strong> Yeah. So that\u2019s the part where you go, how do I go from showing noise? Because there\u2019s a tonne of data that you actually need to be in control of. But how do I make that, easy, digestible?<\/p>\n

So one of the solutions we came up with, and that seems to have gone down really well, people like it, is essentially every view on top has the most important things. So we\u2019ll tell you if there\u2019s stuff that you need to be updating. We\u2019ll tell you if email is not being delivered. We\u2019ll tell you if the percentage of up and down times you\u2019re having is odd, or requires more investigation. Essentially we\u2019re helping you figure out the important things per monitor, per view. And then from there, you can deep dive into the data that we collect and figure out things.<\/p>\n

[00:19:46] Nathan Wrigley:<\/strong> You\u2019re moving away from graphs and data first, into more of a human readable summation in a couple of sentences?<\/p>\n

[00:19:53] Remkus:<\/strong> Yep.<\/p>\n

[00:19:53] Nathan Wrigley:<\/strong> Okay. So you can finally parse what\u2019s going on. Okay. That\u2019s good to know. And you said that\u2019s been well received?<\/p>\n

[00:19:59] Remkus:<\/strong> Yeah, people like it.<\/p>\n

[00:20:00] Nathan Wrigley:<\/strong> Okay.<\/p>\n

[00:20:00] Remkus:<\/strong> It\u2019s more straightforward in terms of quickly understanding what\u2019s going on. That was a big part, and we also wanted to make that information available more easily as well. And what I mean with that is that inside the API you can query this now.<\/p>\n

But more conveniently, we have an MCP server available as well. So you can connect us to your favourite LLM, your favourite AI and just ask the questions. Like let\u2019s say you have a bunch of sites for different clients in there, but one client has a specific question. You\u2019ve labelled them accordingly inside of Scanfully. You can do that now. And then your LLM, you can ask, either ask it to label it, you say these are the domains, labelled them with this client. And then tell me do I have any vulnerabilities? Is email being sent out correctly? Are there any weird DNS changes? What does my uptime look like? And we\u2019ll tell you.<\/p>\n

[00:20:46] Nathan Wrigley:<\/strong> So the API enables you to, I don\u2019t know, if you\u2019re an agency owner, you could build a dashboard, for example, for your clients or something like that. So you could put charts and information in a place where your client can go and see it in a way that makes sense for them.<\/p>\n

[00:20:58] Remkus:<\/strong> Correct.<\/p>\n

[00:20:59] Nathan Wrigley:<\/strong> But the MCP enables you to kind of have a conversation with the security and the current state of your WordPress website. That\u2019s so intriguing.<\/p>\n

[00:21:07] Remkus:<\/strong> Yep.<\/p>\n

[00:21:08] Nathan Wrigley:<\/strong> Have you discovered some interesting, quirky things in there? You know, you you ask it a particular thing and a surprising thing came back?<\/p>\n

[00:21:13] Remkus:<\/strong> I got for one of the sites that I have in my account, I got some intermittent email is not being delivered. And I go, why does it turn on and off all the time? What\u2019s going on here? So I ask it to investigate, look at any commonalities. Look at anything that stands out. And it sure enough came up with something that goes along the lines of there\u2019s conflicting DNS records. So if there\u2019s multiple validation records, I was using a transactional email service for that. But their validation system allows you to have old validation DNS records in there as well. And apparently their system picked up both intermittently. How do you figure that out?<\/p>\n

[00:21:48] Nathan Wrigley:<\/strong> With an MCP, it turns out. Yeah. That\u2019s really interesting.<\/p>\n

[00:21:50] Remkus:<\/strong> Yeah. So it told me, double check the DNS records here, because it looks like, and then I go, okay, let me check that. And I go in, I dive deeper into the dashboard for my transactional email provider. And I go, hold on. This is, okay. I get it now. So let me delete those. I deleted them, and the problem solved.<\/p>\n

[00:22:07] Nathan Wrigley:<\/strong> Does your MCP enable bi-directional things to happen? Or is it basically read only?<\/p>\n

[00:22:12] Remkus:<\/strong> It is read only on the data. It\u2019s write on, like I said, if you want to create labels and other things like that.<\/p>\n

[00:22:18] Nathan Wrigley:<\/strong> Unharmful stuff is right.<\/p>\n

[00:22:20] Remkus:<\/strong> Correct.<\/p>\n

[00:22:21] Nathan Wrigley:<\/strong> Because you are dealing with quite a lot of powerful stuff here, and writing in the wrong direction in a silly way, which let\u2019s be honest, MCPs enable us to be very silly very quickly.<\/p>\n

[00:22:30] Remkus:<\/strong> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.<\/p>\n

[00:22:31] Nathan Wrigley:<\/strong> Okay, that\u2019s good to know. It\u2019s basically read only.<\/p>\n

Okay. We\u2019ve got the dashboard updates with more human readable data. We\u2019ve got the API. We\u2019ve got the MCP. Anything else in Scanfully 2.x?<\/p>\n

[00:22:43] Remkus:<\/strong> If we include 2.x, the release we did yesterday is 2.3. And in that we have much smarter user activity tracking. Content changes. Not only who did the change, but what is the change, that sort of stuff.<\/p>\n

We pull everything out of WordPress into our dashboard. So for instance, we have a full WordPress activity log and in that log, we collect all the things. Whatever happens on your WordPress site, so that\u2019s a plugin installed, updated, all those things. So now user activity is in there as well.<\/p>\n

And it\u2019s also the things happening to your user. So elevated admin rights given to a user. Was that supposed to happen? An email address change to a administrator is something you would want to know. On a multi-site, if a user gets to have super admin, you\u2019ll want to have that logged. So things like that.<\/p>\n

So the 2.0 essentially, which is a week and a half ago, it allowed us to have a whole bunch of other refinements we had essentially lined up. We have a much better foundation to build these things on top of what we now have. So we can move forward much faster.<\/p>\n

[00:23:42] Nathan Wrigley:<\/strong> We\u2019ve already agreed pre hitting the record button that there\u2019s a whole load of stuff which you know is going to occur, but we are not quite ready for public disclosure at the moment.<\/p>\n

One thing that we didn\u2019t touch on, which I suspect people will be listening to this thinking, okay, hang on a minute. How does it all work in terms of, is there a scanfully.com\/whatever login? In other words, do you have a SaaS sort of admin section?<\/p>\n

[00:24:06] Remkus:<\/strong> Yes.<\/p>\n

[00:24:06] Nathan Wrigley:<\/strong> So the plugin kind of binds to that, because I miss that at the beginning.<\/p>\n

[00:24:11] Remkus:<\/strong> Yeah, correct.<\/p>\n

[00:24:11] Nathan Wrigley:<\/strong> We probably should have explained that. So the plugin binds to the SaaS. The SaaS holds the data. And in that way, for example, an agency could have an overview of all the sites that they\u2019re managing and that kind of thing?<\/p>\n

[00:24:23] Remkus:<\/strong> And everything that happens on that site that is worthy of tracking and monitoring for. So again, the activity log is a good example. A WordPress activity log should not live inside the WordPress site, period. From a performance standpoint, it makes no sense. Most databases for most hosting companies have issues when you track and sort a, let\u2019s call it a busy website.<\/p>\n

So what we do is we asynchronously pull all of that into our dashboard. So if your site goes down for whatever reason, we have a track record of what the last things that were happening on your site.<\/p>\n

[00:24:53] Nathan Wrigley:<\/strong> Oh yeah, of course.<\/p>\n

[00:24:55] Remkus:<\/strong> There\u2019s just an easier way of being in check.<\/p>\n

[00:24:58] Nathan Wrigley:<\/strong> So you\u2019d log into the SaaS, everything\u2019s there. So if your site does have some catastrophic failure, then at least you can begin to understand what\u2019s going on.<\/p>\n

[00:25:06] Remkus:<\/strong> Yep.<\/p>\n

[00:25:07] Nathan Wrigley:<\/strong> And work backwards from there?<\/p>\n

[00:25:08] Remkus:<\/strong> Yep.<\/p>\n

[00:25:08] Nathan Wrigley:<\/strong> I think that\u2019s probably all the questions that I\u2019ve got. Is there anything that we didn\u2019t touch on that you wanted to mention?<\/p>\n

[00:25:14] Remkus:<\/strong> I think what\u2019s fun to mention is that this whole rewrite allowed us to start building add-ons as well.<\/p>\n

So the base monitor service as we have it currently is what Scanfully is. So that\u2019s Scanfully monitor. But we\u2019re, and probably by the time this podcast is being aired, I think we will have, the beta available for WooCommerce checkout monitoring.<\/p>\n

This is essentially an add-on to the base service. And what it does, we fully check everything that goes into, from is the product available in your WooCommerce, website? Can I add it to cart? Can I then go to cart? Can I then start the checkout? Can I fill out the checkout? Can I start the processing of the actual payment. So we don\u2019t go into the payment itself? So they\u2019re test orders, so to say.<\/p>\n

[00:25:59] Nathan Wrigley:<\/strong> But the moment right before?<\/p>\n

[00:26:01] Remkus:<\/strong> Yep to the moment, right before. So we\u2019ll tell you if we can\u2019t reach the payments provider. We\u2019ll tell you that, but we can\u2019t, at this moment in time, do the step beyond that.<\/p>\n

[00:26:09] Nathan Wrigley:<\/strong> So how does that work then? Does it literally do that as if it\u2019s a human being, you know?<\/p>\n

[00:26:13] Remkus:<\/strong> It does.<\/p>\n

[00:26:14] Nathan Wrigley:<\/strong> Is some part of your SaaS kind of opening up a browser somewhere in effect and doing that journey. Finding a product, putting it in the cart, checking the cart, and so on.<\/p>\n

[00:26:21] Remkus:<\/strong> And the fun thing is you get to define what that journey looks like. So if you have a custom WooCommerce checkout, or any of the other solutions. We account for that. And you can tell us if it\u2019s any different from what their default is, or the WooCommerce default.<\/p>\n

And from there you get to essentially define the journey. And then the journey is stored as the thing we\u2019re checking. And we\u2019re doing this from the external, obviously. So it doesn\u2019t touch any monetary things. Nothing gets charged, nothing gets booked. And the plugin that is providing the connection to our dashboard, that plugin cleans up whatever test orders were made in that process.<\/p>\n

[00:26:56] Nathan Wrigley:<\/strong> Right, okay. So it\u2019s not 3000 carts.<\/p>\n

[00:26:58] Remkus:<\/strong> Yeah, we don\u2019t, want to do that.<\/p>\n

[00:27:00] Nathan Wrigley:<\/strong> Do you enable that in other ways as well? for example, I\u2019m thinking maybe a contact form is incredibly important to somebody\u2019s business.<\/p>\n

[00:27:07] Remkus:<\/strong> Yep, that\u2019ll be next.<\/p>\n

[00:27:08] Nathan Wrigley:<\/strong> Is it possible to, outside of WordPress, visit a contact page, fill out the form fields, and then even, I don\u2019t know, maybe even check on the other side to see if an email landed or something like that?<\/p>\n

[00:27:17] Remkus:<\/strong> A part of it we\u2019ve already solved with the email monitoring, or I should say email deliverability monitoring.<\/p>\n

[00:27:23] Nathan Wrigley:<\/strong> Of course you\u2019re on the inside there, so you can see whether that got sent.<\/p>\n

[00:27:27] Remkus:<\/strong> Yes. But once we\u2019re fully done with releasing the WooCommerce checkout monitoring, we are going to move to forms next. Because you\u2019re right, if you have a landing pages, or a critical contact form or whatever, you need to know that that still is working as intended.<\/p>\n

[00:27:41] Nathan Wrigley:<\/strong> So that\u2019s a roadmap item. To be able to build these custom journeys, starting with WooCommerce, but more or less anything at some point. We want to see if people are going from A to B to C as we\u2019d hoped.<\/p>\n

[00:27:52] Remkus:<\/strong> Yeah, it\u2019ll be a separate thing in the sense that WooCommerce will do a lot more than just checking the validity of the form, because that\u2019s essentially on the WooCommerce side of things, that\u2019s the checkout form. You fill out the form. And that\u2019s the most similar to a general form. But yeah, we will build a separate feature inside of Scanfully that allows you to do all the types of monitoring you could possibly imagine you would need to make sure your forms are working the way you design them.<\/p>\n

[00:28:16] Nathan Wrigley:<\/strong> Random question just before we end. How exciting do you find this? When you embark on the journey of building a product like this, you know, oh we\u2019re going to do this thing, me and my friend. We\u2019re going to do this thing, it\u2019s going to be brilliant. And then the reality sets in, you know, it\u2019s difficult, you\u2019ve got to manage customers and all that kind of stuff. Do you still wake up excited by this?<\/p>\n

[00:28:32] Remkus:<\/strong> Oh yeah.<\/p>\n

[00:28:33] Nathan Wrigley:<\/strong> Obviously you\u2019re not going to say the opposite. I\u2019m just wondering if that curiosity still remains and whether or not.<\/p>\n

[00:28:38] Remkus:<\/strong> It does, because there\u2019s just so much more we can still do. And the feedback that we\u2019re getting is very positive. And especially with this new imagination of how this should be solved with the 2.x reboot I guess is probably the best word. It just excites me on the potentials that we have.<\/p>\n

The WooCommerce checkout monitoring is a good example, but there\u2019s tonnes of other add-ons we have in mind where it just makes sense for you to have the Scanfully monitor as base. But there\u2019s stuff that we can do more. We\u2019re already gathering it in one way or another, and just to be super complete with what we\u2019re presenting. Yeah, that excites me, yeah.<\/p>\n

[00:29:11] Nathan Wrigley:<\/strong> Okay, thank you for chatting to me today. Scanfully.com. Go and check it out. Remkus, where are you apart from there? If people want to contact you, are you available on a particular platform, I don\u2019t know, social media or email or what?<\/p>\n

[00:29:26] Remkus:<\/strong> remk.us<\/p>\n

[00:29:28] Nathan Wrigley:<\/strong> Nice. Of course you have that domain. Yeah. That\u2019s lovely. In which case Remkus I will speak to you soon and thank you for chatting to us about Scanfully.<\/p>\n

[00:29:38] Remkus:<\/strong> Thank you for having me.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/details>\n

On the podcast today we have Remkus De Vries<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Remkus has been active in the WordPress space for over twenty years, starting out with his own agency focused on high-performance, scalable WordPress websites. Over time, he has diversified into education and community-building with projects like WithinWP and a new initiative, The Guild, which is a paid community aimed at helping people build smarter, more performant sites through a first principles approach.<\/p>\n

Our conversation centers on Scanfully, a site health and monitoring SaaS Remkus co-founded, which recently hit version 2.0. Scanfully\u2019s focus is giving users meaningful, actionable insights into WordPress site health, security, performance, email deliverability, DNS, and more, packing all this data into an easy to understand dashboard.<\/p>\n

We talk about Remkus\u2019 motivation for diving deep into the complexities of WordPress monitoring, and why many users struggle to keep on top of the technical side of their websites. Remkus argues that too many site owners are stuck in reactive mode, only investigating issues once something breaks, and Scanfully aims to change that mindset by making ongoing health checks accessible and easy to parse, even for the spreadsheet-averse.<\/p>\n

Remkus walks us through the product\u2019s evolution, including the 2.0 update that aimed to reimagine their dashboard experience, added public APIs, and introduced tools like MCP AI integration, empowering users to query their site\u2019s health conversationally.<\/p>\n

We also get into recent and upcoming features such as WooCommerce checkout monitoring, activity logs, and future add-ons designed to cover forms and other business-critical flows.<\/p>\n

If you manage multiple WordPress sites, run an agency, or are simply interested in building more robust, future-proof WordPress projects, this episode is for you.<\/p>\n

Useful links<\/h2>\n

Scanfully<\/a><\/p>\n

Scanfully 2.0 release post<\/a><\/p>\n

Within WordPress<\/a><\/p>\n

The Guild<\/a><\/p>\n

Remkus\u2019 personal website<\/a><\/p>\n

Remkus on X<\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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